From Fear to Love: Dissecting Political Trust in China

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Abstract (English)

The remarkably high level of political trust observed in Chinese surveys has ignited enduring debates regarding whether fear has inflated these numbers. The opposing sides share one assumption: fear and trust are inherently contradictory. Our study proposes an alternative view. Grounded in cognitive dissonance theory, which holds that induced compliance can lead to sincere attitude change, we argue that fear has in fact increased political trust in China. We take Xi’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign as a quasi-natural experiment to test this theory. Using 2002-2021 survey data and employing a Difference-in-Differences model, we take the campaign as treatment and regime insiders as the treated group, finding that political trust among regime insiders increased faster than among outsiders during the campaign. This finding withstands various robustness checks. Our study not only addresses the fear-love conundrum in China studies but also uncovers a general mechanism of legitimacy production in deeply authoritarian states.

Notes (English)